Innocence Lost
by Faust VII
Summary: "I can't remember the day I lost my innocence." Harry's POV. One Shot. Continuation of onoM's Plot Bunny. Dark fic. No Pairings.


I can't remember the day I lost my innocence.

Innocence, what a strange word, but to me it was important: it was a secret, quiet joy that filled my waking minutes and waited impatiently beside me while I slept, blissfully unaware of the cruel vicissitudes of fate. I was so full of life...

But that life left when my innocence bled away. It happened slowly, not abruptly as one would imagine. I didn't even notice it bleeding out till it was gone. It happened sometime between when the war started and when my best friends died. I woke one morning to discover I was naught but a shell.

For the longest of time I had laid in my bed and wondered what had changed. I thought, and thought, and thought, and then I realized. I realized that my innocence was lost and I could not find it. It had bled out so discreetly I had not even notice the flow.

And I was scared. Oh was I scared. The innocence in me was what had kept me alive and going. It had given me _hope_.

Without it I was terrified but oh so accepting. The innocence had bled from me and was not coming back and I suddenly realized what reality was. It slapped me sharply in the face and I was left staring at my bleak, short future.

My innocence had been something I had held close, put behind walls of iron and ice and passion. And still, a wound had dinted that armour and the innocence had bled away. People had died for that innocence in me. My mother and father, happy laughter and love, had died for it in flashes of green fire. Sirius had died for it, grins and taunts, as he fell through the fluttering cloth that was the door to death. Dumbledore with his twinkling blue eyes and bright colored robes and words of wisdoms had died on a tower, plummeting to the unforgiving ground.

And my friends….oh my friends! Ron, wild and untamed, passionate and loud. He was not the brightest or the most calm, but he'd been a friend, my first friend! And Hermione. Smart, bookish Hermione, with a wild fervour for learning and life. Perhaps she hadn't been the most understanding but she'd always been there! And they had died for me and my innocence, cut down by the men who'd made the wound in my armour.

Without them I was nothing anymore. The few I had left could not patch up the dints and the cuts in my heart and my mind. They could not find my innocence and inject it back into my veins, for it was forever lost between the beginning of an age old war between good and evil, and the loss of my two best friends who'd died before even living.

With the realization that my innocence was long lost I settled down to do what I should have done so long ago. I studied, and learned, and sought, and trained. My innocence had been a baggage that had held me back from pursuing my studies of death, and murder, and war. It had been a baggage that is now much missed and which I yearn to have returned, but with it gone, the hollowness can be filled with the sins I need to end this war.

I found books upon books in both the Black and the Potter libraries. I dug through them to learn magic that tainted my soul and made me only sin. The magic I called upon was twisted and black and evil. It took root in my blood and I cared naught but to finish it.

When my studies started yielding nothing and no new training came up I knew I was ready.

With sharp words in a harsh tongue and blood of mine that had turned black, I called forth the power I needed to finish it. A demon it was, that rose from the black smoke, called by my temptation of blood and death. It rose with a grin of delight and latched onto me like a parasite. It dug its hook deep into me taking root in my mind and my body. Horns sprouted from my head and wings from my back. Fingernails shifted to claws and teeth into fangs. My hair grew too wild too untamed. My skin turned whiter then snow. But my eyes, oh my eyes, they stayed as green as the fiery death that had taken my innocence from me.

I was no longer human, I was more then sin.

Now, I only know that whatever happened to me, I'd rather die than allow it to happen to another child. It is this drive alone, this fierce determination to protect the world from what I have become, that allows me to face the dread of waking up again.

I'll wake soon, and then I'll head out. All who wear black cloaks and white skulls and inked marks will die. I'll render their flesh from their bone and feast on their souls and their pain. Their blood will adorn me as a victory cloak. And then I'll face the ones who leads them. He's an abomination, though I think it's hypocritical of me to say that about him when I am now so much worse.

And I'll kill him. Perhaps not quickly, but I will kill him and end his reign. I know it will also be the end of me. Because to stop him I've killed myself. And what has taken my place I will use the last of my power to kill as my enemy finally falls dead. I'll fade away, most likely to hell with the demon still latched to my soul, but it'll finally end.

Because _he_'ll be gone. And so will I.

And so, Fate, a toast to you. To the loss of innocence.

It shall _not_ go unpunished.

.-.

Hope you liked it. Harry's POV.

This is a continuation of onoM's Plot Bunny that they asked someone to complete:

_I can't remember the day I lost my innocence. _

_Innocence, what a strange word, but to me it was important: it was a secret, quiet joy that filled my waking minutes and waited impatiently beside me while I slept, blissfully unaware of the cruel vicissitudes of fate. I was so full of life..._

_Now, I only know that whatever happened to me, I'd rather die than allow it to happen to another child. It is this drive alone, this fierce determination to protect the world from what I have become, that allows me to face the dread of waking up again._

_And so, Fate, a toast to you. To the loss of innocence._

_It shall __not__ go unpunished._


End file.
